Retribution

iUniverse, Inc.

Chapter One

His flock at home was given no such treatment. If I was due a punishment, my mother was blamed as well; for being responsible for my actions, he felt she was as much at fault as I, the sinner. Where he would strap or paddle me for my misdemeanor, he would punch or slap her. My mother defended him by saying he was only continuing the cycle of his own rearing and we would survive. I never found out what in his rearing caused him to be the callous individual he was to us and, in truth, I never really had a mind to investigate. I grew up hating the coward with a vengeance.

Sometimes we, the defenseless ones, would be unaware that a member of the church had lodged a complaint against me. It would be something minor like perhaps my bicycle had left a tire mark on a front lawn or I had been in a fight at school with someone else's child. The old man would walk through the door while we sat with bated breath waiting to see what wrath his latest homecoming brought down on us. There were nights when he smiled slightly, ate his tea, talked of his day in holy land and retired to his study for the evening whereupon we smiled at each other and sighed in relief. At other times, he came home wearing a dark brooding face and ordered me to my room. I would sit on my bed and listen to the sounds of violence coming from below. My mother never screamed and he never hit her face or arms. When my turn came, he would walk into the bedroom holding the method of my punishment. By a very early age, I knew to kneel by the bed with hands in supplication to his god. After a dozen strokes, numbness came and the flagellation usually stopped at twenty.

Our final year together, my fourteenth in his ministerial purgatory, my mother and I reached the limit of our endurance. We mustered all of the resolve and dignity he had left in us and packed two suitcases. We fled to her sister's house in Calgary. We were found easily and the Canadian police brought us to the border where, in the company of a social services representative, my father took his possessions into his keeping without troubling the law any further.

Strangely he did not punish us for that major occurrence, perhaps slavering over our obvious fear, but the first and last time I made a small mistake in his eyes, and what it was escapes me now, I was sure he would kill us both. He was flinging my gentle mother around the dining room where she bounced off the walls, and when I saw the blood gush from her nose, something snapped inside me. `Stop!' I shouted. He turned to look at me with violent eyes as I grabbed at his sweaty shirt. For the first time in my life, an adult punched me. I was of slim build in those days and I think my jaw cracked or broke as I hit the wall. I looked into the livid face of a demon. He did not speak, just pointed to the stairs. I walked quickly to my room. Another first was the scream my mother let out as something came crashing down, then silence for a moment, before the heavy footfall on the stairs.

I took a baseball bat from under the bed and stood before the door. When he entered, with head down, he was still out of breath. I swung as hard as I could and caught him at the side of the mouth before ducking around and out through the open door. With a bellow, he was after me in a flash. I ran down into the dining room and stopped in shock. My mother lay still under a tall china cabinet. The side of her head poured blood onto the floor. I ran to the kitchen with the demon not far behind. I grabbed for a knife from the rack, turned and stood waiting as he stopped in the doorway, bloody mouthed and mad eyed.

"God set me down at a fork in the night road," he growled, "and meeting your mother clouded my judgment. Unwittingly, I took the sinner's path; and then you came along. Both of you have sorely tried my patience, and I have failed. I am not Job. It is over for me but you will accompany me beyond this life to whatever place I am destined to occupy. For the Lord knoweth the way of the righteous; but the way of the ungodly shall perish."

I found a voice that came to me from beyond my tender years, and it was painful speaking through my injured and swelling jaw. "Don't quote Psalms to me, you bastard; your actions have nothing to do with God or destiny, Father; they are no more than the plain cruelty of a coward. I may well go with you momentarily but I will refuse to occupy the same part of hell that you do and I will cut you before you take me."

He moved across the kitchen and I was raising the butcher's knife when his hand shot forward and gripped my wrist. My concealed left hand came round in an arc holding a small paring knife and I embedded it in the side of his throat, twisted and pulled. By sheer luck, not judgment, I must have pierced the carotid artery for, in an instant, blood sprayed down on top of me. His attack was forgotten as he fought to stop the bleeding. "Get me a towel," he wheezed.

I ignored his plea and walked from the kitchen as he struggled towards the towel rack. With difficulty, I moved the cabinet off my dear mother. She was dead. Tears blinded me as I stood up. I went back into the kitchen where my father was now sitting with his back to the kitchen bench trying to stem the flow of blood from a wound that was larger than I would've imagined. His skin was gray. I lifted the big knife off the floor and knelt down beside him.

"You killed her, you unholy bastard." I said this calmly knowing that shouting would have no impact on him now. "So much for a man of God; so much for your destiny. The road was not forked where we entered your life; you had passed that fork long before we became your punching bags and you had already taken a wrong turn. You murdered your wife and now I'm your judge, old man, and guess what, I am sending you to hell with the use of this." I held up the large blade. He made a feeble grasp for the hand which held the method of his end. "This is for all the suffering you laid on us and for the taking of a gentle life. If hell is not your destination and your god is waiting to welcome you, tell him to improve his choices." Using both hands, I plunged the knife into the other side of his neck and left it there. I pressed my thumb into his blood and placed it against his forehead. "The mark of Cain," I said softly. Without looking at the result, I walked out of the kitchen.

I knelt by my mother again and pulled her dress into a proper and fitting shape. I went up to the bathroom and returned with a wash cloth. I cleaned the blood from her soft, beautiful countenance, kissed her mouth and left her there in repose. In later years, I would realize I had not loved my mother as a child normally does but I felt a strong pity for her in that she, not the demon, had made the wrong choice.

My whole face was throbbing but the adrenaline, and three painkillers I swallowed, held the pain in check.

I found a large pair of scissors and went to the bathroom where I cut my hair very short and as neatly as was possible. I swept up the dead hair and flushed it down the toilet. I showered my father's filthy blood away, and...